With all the enthusiasm (you suspect) of a child swallowing boiled broccoli, Sunday’s New York Times Book Review presented a high-minded Poetry Symposium* in which various poets handled the unenviable task of picking a “book of poetry, published in the last 25 years, [that] has meant the most to you personally–the book you have found […]
I came across this site via the splinters blog: espressostories. According to the text on the somewhat rebarbatively designed site, it provides stories that follow the “basic rule…that they’re just a sentence or two, totalling 25 words or less.” The project is inspired by Augusto Monterroso’s “famous” story, ‘The Dinosaur’”:When he woke up, the dinosaur […]
After poring over the kilos of newsprint lugged into the house over the weekend, I think I could draw a graph that proves the equation that the number of newspapers you buy is inversely proportional to the articles you actually want to read. At first glance, most of the supplements’ pages seem like unashamed celebrations […]
This month’s issue of threemonkeysonline should make some professional journos tug their collars with unease. After all, with an interview with one of the filmmakers behind the documentary The Corporation, a discussion with Greg Palast on American politics, and a talk with Sarah Hall, a rising author recently shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the online […]
A report (registration required) in the LA Times from November 15 provides details on the destruction wrought in Falluja (the LA Times spells it ‘FALLOUJA’–if the insurgency lasts much longer the Chicago Manual of Style might have to start listing the standardized spelling of major Iraqi cities) during the bizarrely named ‘Operation Phantom Fury.’ (Presumably […]
RTE is promoting the snappily titled “Fair City Civil Action Special” on its website. Always slow to jump on the bandwagon, our indigenous soap opera has finally decided to exploit the issue of child abuse undertaken by Catholic priests. No doubt there will be the usual fig leaf of public service education when a concerned […]
Travelling into work the other day, during a break in “Morning Ireland”, I heard a sequence of clips of famous Americans giving famous quotes. There was Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you”, Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream”, and Roosevelt’s “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” […]
Today’s New York Times reports that New York neighbourhoods in the Bronx, Yonkers, and Queens that have traditionally been home to Irish immigrants are seeing both naturalised citizens and illegals who came to the U.S. in the 1980s and 1990s returning to Ireland in unprecedented numbers. Such is the scale of the exodus that, according […]
One of the (few?) advantages of maintaining a blog is that it prevents you from indulging in that most futile of bourgeois literary exercises: writing letters to the editor. Two pieces in this weekend’s papers got my letter-writing dander up.The first was by Mark Lawson, in the Guardian. His op-ed columns are often rather lazy, […]
My post-colonial hackles are bristling again. This time the offender is the toxic AA Gill. In yesterday’s Sunday Times he reviewed some new gardening show co-hosted by Diarmuid Gavin:Diarmuid is the bad boy of gardening, a bit of a little rude rebel, a red-hot poker among the lilies. Gavin defends his wicked rep with a […]
